The Forts Henry and Donelson Campaign: February 6–16, 1862 (Civil War Campaigns in the West) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven E. Woodworth has authored, co-authored, or edited more than thirty books, including Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to Civil War and Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865.

Charles D. Grear is the author of Why Texans Fought in the Civil War and an extensive list of other publications on the state's involvement. Together, Woodworth and Grear have edited several books in the Civil War Campaigns in the West series, including The Vicksburg Assaults, May 19–22, 1863, and Vicksburg Besieged.

Contributions by Michael Burns, Sheilah R. Elwardani, Blakeney K. Hill, Jonathan M. Steplyk, and Brian S. Wills.

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Introduction

As the month of February 1862 began, the Civil War was almost ten months old, and during that entire period, as well as for the five months between the first secession and the Confederate attack at Fort Sumter, almost nothing had gone right for the Union cause or wrong for the Confederacy. During Buchanan’s lame-duckicy the Deep South states had seized every federal installation―save two―within their borders, appropriating tens of thousands of dollars worth of government property and expelling every vestige of federal authority. The two exceptions were the irrelevant Fort Pickens off Pensacola and the surrounded and outnumbered Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. After the Confederates attacked and captured Sumter in April 1861, most of the Upper South states trampled federal authority and seized federal property―including the Norfolk Navy Yard―with scarcely more trouble than had been experienced by their more southerly neighbors. The barrels of the guns around Charleston harbor had hardly grown cool before the self-styled Confederacy was basking in the de facto enjoyment of almost everything for which its founders had launched their rebellion. Their Confederacy extended over almost all of eleven states (though some were still a few weeks from formal admission), and outside the vicinity of the District of Columbia and a coastal enclave or two, no vestige of federal authority remained within its borders.

Nor was the Confederacy’s favorable situation quick to change. In June a minor Union advance from Norfolk ended in the small but embarrassing fiasco known as the Battle of Big Bethel. The following month a major Union advance from Washington toward Richmond ended thirty miles from the former place in a much larger and more embarrassing fiasco at Bull Run. The next month Union and Confederate troops clashed at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri. The result was no Union embarrassment, but it was a defeat nonetheless. An exception to the dismal string of Union losses was the action in western Virginia, where blue-coats won a couple of small victories that summer, paving the way for the counter-secession of the Old Dominion’s western counties. Then the drumbeat of Confederate victory resumed in October 1861 with yet another Union fiasco, this one along the Potomac at Balls Bluff, near Leesburg, Virginia. January 1862 brought the small Union victory at Mill Springs in eastern Kentucky, but it was a strategic dead-end for the Union, opening the way into the wilds of the central Appalachians in the dead of winter. Neither the hills of western Virginia nor those of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee were anywhere near the Confederacy’s strategic center of gravity. Everywhere else along the thousand-miles of its claimed extent, the Confederacy held all of the states that had announced their secession as well as parts of Missouri and Kentucky, which had not.  

February 1862 brought a dramatic change in the momentum of the war. On February 4 Union troops under Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant began landing near Fort Henry, lynchpin of Confederate control of the Tennessee River. Two days later a cooperating squadron of Union gunboats under the command of Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote battered the fort into submission, and the Tennessee River was open to Union gunboats and transports all the way to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. On February 11 Grant began moving his force across the dozen-mile-wide neck of land that here separated the Tennessee from the Cumberland River and the following day opened operations against Fort Donelson, gateway to control of the Cumberland. On February 16, that fort too surrendered, leaving no significant obstacle to river-borne Union forces advancing all the way to Nashville, if they cared to. Grant’s victory also netted more than 13,000 Confederate prisoners, making the Battle of Fort Donelson the largest surrender on the North American continent up to that time.  

Grant and Foote’s twin victories on the Tennessee and Cumberland extinguished the Rebel presence in Kentucky and cost the Confederacy half of Tennessee’s land area and more than half of its population, industry, agriculture, and wealth. It shifted the fighting front from the Upper South to the Deep South and cost the Confederacy manpower it could not replace. It set the Confederacy back on its heels in the western theater. Through the rest of the war every major Confederate effort west of the Appalachians was, in effect, an attempt to reverse the outcome of the Henry and Donelson Campaign, while successive Union offensives leveraged the advantages gained in February 1862 to gain still more strategic advantages until Union forces had choked the life out of the Confederacy in the broad region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, the true center of gravity for the slaveholders’ republic.  

In short, the campaign that took forts Henry and Donelson was the turning point of the Civil War. Much fighting remained to be done after the white flag appeared on Fort Donelson’s ramparts. Indeed most of the war lay ahead. There would be many chances for the Confederacy to attempt to turn momentum back in its direction or to exhaust the Union’s will to prevail. Nevertheless, in the theater in which the war’s military outcome was ultimately to be decided, the massive shift of momentum that took place during ten days in February 1862 opened the way for final Union victory.  

The campaign is worth another look. It is no denigration of the several previous excellent accounts to suggest that more can be learned from studies focused on specific aspects of the Henry and Donelson Campaign. In this volume, several scholars do so.

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